"I am alive?" he asked her, his eyes fluttering.

"It seems so," she said, old anger plain on her face.

He remembered the arc of the grenade, the shock of it, the tearing pain as his arms and legs accelerated faster than his torso could keep them attached. He remembered her standing over him. He remembered her spit in his eye.

"You killed me," he said.

"No, but I'm told you'll probably wish I did." she said. He turned his head (how could he do that, he wondered?) and he saw they were sitting in the clearing outside his cave. The mountains rose around him, familiar and unhelpful. They'd found him, somehow, and they'd sent...her? She didn't look like any Special Forces soldier he'd ever seen.

She sat on the ground next to him, arms wrapped around her legs, staring off into the dusk. The sun had faded from orange to red, and its light barely caught on the bars of his cages. She'd freed his captives; he wondered where she'd taken them.

"So what now?" he asked her. "You take me back to your masters, your fascist, monopolist, lying scum, and they put me in a box forever?"

She looked at him for the first time since his awakening. "Yes," she said, simply, and went back to staring into the woods.

"So why you, then? Why not some trained killers, or a strike of your unholy drones?"

"Because I can't kill," she said, monotone. "They wanted you alive, and no matter what I did, I couldn't kill you."

"How can this be?" he asked.

"No one knows," she said. "One day, after he'd tortured me, I tried to kill my torturer. And I saw something, something beautiful, and it said I shouldn't be allowed to screw up my afterlife by murdering people. So...now I can't."

He gaped. "Your place in Paradise was saved for you by an angel?"

Her grim silence did not dispute him. It also did not hold a single measure of peace.

"It seems so."

"And yet you spurn your blessing," he spat angrily. "Typical."

"Fuck you," she said absently.

"Accept your gift, you idiot woman," he tried to shout, but it came out as a cough. "You cannot stain your soul with a death."

"No," she replied, "but I can keep trying."

[EDIT: cleanup]